Hey everyone. Welcome to Nontrivial. I'm your host, Sean mcclure. In this episode, I talk about penny pinching, which I take to mean any kind of nitpicking or hyper detailed behavior that I argue leads to bad long term outcomes.
Penny pinching is when we try to use all the information available to weigh the pros and cons and make an informed decision as how to best act, I will argue that while this might make us feel better in the moment and sound smart to others, it's in fact, more often than not unintelligent because it doesn't take into account how things play out over the long run. I use the term rich in this episode to mean any kind of prosperity. Whether that's money, family, friends, contentment.
What's important to understand here is that when I say the rich don't penny pinch, the non penny pinching behavior came before the person got rich. It's an approach to life that is high level, approximate and often looks dumb or uninformed in the moment yet leads to truly successful outcomes. Let's get started. OK. So let's begin by talking about what I mean by penny pinching behavior be uh be be specific here.
So as mentioned in the introduction, this is the detail oriented assessment people do in situations, right? You see all this, you see this all the time people do it when they are deciding where to eat. Uh they, they do it when they're cutting coupons out of the flyer, right?
The most literal example, they do it when they're deciding uh who might make a good life partner or uh what clothes to bring on a camping trip or which hotel to stay at, they do it when they're stressing over their investments, uh you know, deciding on what school to attend or which company to work for people do detail oriented work all the time.
It's a quote unquote system, two kind of thinking to borrow can's phrasing, uh well known psychologist, the mind's slower analytical mode where reason dominates. OK. So penny pinching sounds like a really good thing to do. I mean, especially for important life decisions like money and education and life partners. Now, I I'm not here to tell you that we should never slow down and assess the situation closely, but rather that it's easy to do this in situations where it's not appropriate.
The reason it's often not appropriate is because we almost never have access to the amount and kind of information that would make penny pinching an effective life strategy. OK. So any time we look into the details of something, we are making a big assumption about how information maps to the future. We are assuming information can be tallied up in some to some final answer that best tells us what to do in a given situation. But this isn't how information works in complex situations.
Under complexity information does not move from input to output is a linear sum of its parts. Information works in nonlinear and highly ope ways, right? The way information gets used in a complexity is multiplicative where bits of information interact with other bits of information. In ways we will never know, we know, we will never know because this is a fundamental property of complex systems. The causal chain that links inputs to outputs cannot be known, right?
So a consequence of this multiplicative complex interaction of information is that we cannot know how information we have available today will play out in the long run. We cannot tally the information and run cost benefit analysis for anything. But the simplest of systems, simple systems by definition condescend to let us know how information flows from beginning to end. But in complex systems, this is not the case.
OK. So you know, we can get into the information theoretic reasons for opacity in complex systems. When I say opacity, I mean, the fact that you can't see how the input becomes the output, we don't know how things come together to produce the thing that we're observing, we can get all into that there are rigorous information theoretical mathematical reasons why this is the case when you study and understand complex systems. That's not what I'm here to do today.
What I want to talk about is how the type of behavior that makes us look smart in the moment where we're using lots of facts and details ends up not being smart in the long run. OK. So I gave some examples in the beginning. Let's take a look at a couple more to uh to dig a little bit deeper. Imagine you're in your car driving and you notice someone in another car alone wearing a mask. I'm kind of getting sick of the COVID examples.
Hopefully, I won't have to have too many more of these, but this is where we're at. So, so this is during the COVID pandemic and, and we see someone wearing a mask uh in the car by themselves and at first it's not overly surprising, but then you stop and think, well, wait a second. This person is alone and wearing a mask. Isn't that odd? In fact, it seems downright ridiculous. Why would anyone wear a mask in their car when they're alone?
But if we're only taking into consideration the information that is immediately available, then the, the the situation does indeed seem pretty ridiculous. But if we stop and consider what might be the broader context, we can imagine scenarios where wearing a mask alone makes a lot of sense. For example, if the person is driving to the supermarket where it will be required by law to wear a mask.
They're wearing a mask in the car en route to the market makes sense because why fumble and fidget with the thing? The mask when you're getting out of your vehicle or walking into the building? Right? It doesn't make sense. Does it make more sense to just give yourself a blanket policy that says I put on my mask whenever I leave the house and I don't take it off till like at home.
That means trying to, you know, it's better than trying to keep track of who needs me to wear the mask or the chance of dropping the mask or dirty hands, touching the mask or losing the mask or whatever. Now, I'm not trying to suggest here whether or not people should wear the masks in the car when they're by themselves. The point is if is, if we step back and consider what might be the broader context, it becomes possible that the behavior is, in fact, not so stupid.
In fact, it might be more stupid to not wear the mask in situations like being by yourself inside a car or walking, you know, by yourself on a trail because there are so many situations that could arise where by law you're going to have to put on the mask anyway and having the habit of putting a mask on regardless makes all the possible scenarios, a non-issue Ok. Uh As soon as example, maybe, you know, it's still kind of related, washing your hands when you get home.
Does it make more sense to ask yourself if you touched anything when you stepped outside? Maybe you were just grabbing something from the car, you recall using your keys to press the elevator buttons. Uh But what about the car while you're the only one who really touches the handle anyway? But maybe you touch something else but viruses don't really last on surfaces that long anyway. Or do they?
I forget, what did the last study say is, does it make sense to reason about the situation with all the available information you think you have or does it make more sense to just wash your hands when you get in? Regardless? It should be obvious that the, the, you know, the most correct answer here is just wash your hands. And the reason is that it's a low cost decision that doesn't cause you any harm, right?
Uh I had to use a similar example a few episodes ago when I was talking about water bottles and expiry dates. Right? You can, you can chase down all the studies you want about plastic, potentially leaking into water or you can just make a general rule that all food and drugs have expiry dates. It makes it a non-issue. It avoids potential lawsuits and it costs almost nothing to implement.
So what's smarter running a ton of naive analysis on potential water contamination in plastic bottles, uh with plastic bottles or just putting the expiry date on the bottle. Hopefully the answer there is uh is pretty obvious. So these examples might seem kind of trivial but we do this all the time in real life situations, right? We we quote unquote penny pinch, the information we think is available and sound fairly smart and or even responsible doing.
So the literal example of course, is cutting out coupons from the flyer attempting to save money. It sounds smart on the surface. If you are quote unquote money smart, then why not look for opportunity to spend less after all over time, you should, you know, that should amount to potentially large savings, right? And, and might make a difference when the time comes to make a big payment or something.
But cutting out coupons and saving bits of money goes against what we know about how information maps in the future. What is more likely than someone making a positive difference in their life by penny pinching is them not putting in the, uh, is not putting themselves in opportunities way. And that's what I want to talk about now.
So the thing about information and complexity is that, you know, we don't have access to the amount of type of information, like I said before, that, like I said before, that allows us to make penny pinching kinds of decisions. Instead, we have approximate high level abstract signals from the environment that guide us towards an objective, right? We we find certain tasks fun, we become attracted to certain situations, we feel uneasy about others.
We feel inclined to go visit somewhere or someone. These are these are feelings and these feelings are not ghosts with no substance. They are evolutionary strategies to solve problems when information is scarce, right? Feelings are uh ephemeral and ill defined precisely because they operate at the highest levels of abstraction and they enable convergence to good solutions feelings.
In other words, don't pretend to have access to information that's not available, but the same cannot be said for analytical or logical thinking, right? So in other words, the reason penny pinching behavior doesn't map to successful outcomes is because it can't solve genuinely complex problems. It cannot see past extremely short prediction horizons as we'd say, right? Life is immensely complex. It involves countless pieces that interact with uh you know, in in ways that we just can't know.
And this strong interdependence between life's inputs are what renders this this analytical style thinking impotent under complexity. Analytical style thinking requires pieces that visibly connect in a logical fashion. Such that the you know, the causal chain between input and output is apparent in the complex regime, which is what we're talking about here. Such causal chains cannot be uncovered, right? This isn't an opinion. This is this is a fundamental property of genuinely complex things.
OK. So here's the point. Those who don't embrace uncertainty are failing to attempt multiple paths to solve a problem. This is a critical ingredient in any approach that hopes to make complex problems trackable in any regime where no causal chain can be uncovered. The solutions are not available without random sampling as what we would call it as kind of like a statistical mathematical way of thinking about it. But it basically just means that you've got all these possibilities.
And instead of trying to reason about what might be the best one, you, you have to admit that you, you don't have access to that kind of information. And so you just have to, to, to randomly try things out by trial and error, you have to randomly sample different possibilities and try to coax that information out from the environment, right? So only through rapid ad hoc sampling of of the so-called space of possibilities, do complex problems become tractable.
This is the realm of deep epistemic uncertainty. We don't know what we don't know. And so we must apply trial and error and course correction to converge on solutions that produce valuable outputs. OK. This is very different than the kind of logical mathematical idea of a solution, right? It's, it's, it's not something that you can go about in a step by step fashion where you see how the different pieces come together to produce the output.
You're never going to see how those pieces come together. OK? And, and this is the definition of a complex problem. You find this in computer science, you can find this in complexity science. OK? This is how we we information and, and mathematically understand complexity is that you, you, when, when I say opacity earlier is this inability to see how that causal chain is connected.
You're never going to see it to, to achieve a solution is not to see that chain, to achieve a solution is to converge on something that works. OK? And that's that. So it's a different, it's, it's how we solve problems in the real world. OK? It's not, it's not some logical, logical, analytical telling uh of the information. So, so penny pitching behavior is the opposite of this kind of random sampling approach that I'm talking about, right?
Because penny pinchers, they become fixed on their analysis and, and, and they're tempted by their precision. OK? Because it's intoxicating to hear one's own analysis of the situation, right? Our innate fear of the unknown makes us feel good about the narrative. We need control. OK? But you have to understand that that that control is illusory. It only exists in our minds. It's not in reality, the narrative that we use to satiate our fears about the future are still just that the stories. OK?
So this is why non penny pinching behavior works. OK? Because non penny pinching behavior, the opposite of penny pinching behavior. This this high level approximate is, is, is approximate. It's, it's, it's near random type behavior.
And we see this with successful people in complex domains and, and, and the fact that, that, that you know what we're calling successful people in this episode, which again, could be any kind of definition of success doesn't have to be money related, but some kind of prosperity or contentment in life. It shouldn't be surprising that they behave like this. It's precisely in line with how genuinely complex problems get solved. Again, life is complex. It's got so many pieces, it's got opacity.
We can't see how it all fits together to be happy, right? To, to have uh any kind of success in life. You've got to be able to solve the problems under complexity with, with, with a, with an extreme epidemic, uncertainty or scarcity of information. So we need to move through life in a very approximate kind of surface level fashion. Because if we pretend to have access to more information than we do, there are dire consequences. OK? And that's really the point.
It's not merely that focusing on the details don't work. It's that they are massively detrimental if you do that because they prevent you from sampling enough possibilities. Penny pinching freezes you into a path that will not work unless you're extremely lucky, which of course isn't reproducible anyway. OK. So you understand how we're, how I'm framing this, which I have done in other episodes for different situations is it really comes down to, you know, how are you solving complex problems?
We know how complex problems are solved, you know, how to define a complex problem. We understand how this works in, in, you know, from an information theoretic standpoint, we understand it from, you know, kind of a rigorous mathematical probabilistic standpoint. But you don't even have to get into that. We understand that in life because we can look at, you know, from an evolutionary standpoint, how organisms solve problems, how, how, how living beings solve problems through life.
It's not by penny pinching, it's not by t information up. It's not by, you know, forming some causal chain between inputs and outputs because that doesn't even exist or if it does exist, we don't have access to it. And so we, we, we know that that is not how complex problems are solved.
OK. So, so again, penny pinching is this idea that you're accessing all the bits of information, you know, the pros and cons, you're going to do a cost benefit analysis and then you're gonna make the best decision other than the simplest systems. That's just BS. It is, it's demonstrably BS because we know we know that this is just not how information works. We know it's not how it maps to the future. OK? I get it, it, it makes us sound smart. It does penny pinching.
If I, if I say if someone asked me why I I made a decision. Why are you going to that school or why are you doing this podcast or, or why are you, you know, getting a vaccine or not getting a vaccine or whatever it is? You know, I can give this big, um you know, answer with all. Well, I've weighed this and I looked at this and logically blah, blah, blah, and it's going to sound very smart. Oh, yeah, you obviously did a lot of reading. You obviously took into account a lot of information.
I mean, look it, it's, it sounds like a nice story and you will sound smart, but you're not going to be, you're not going to be smart. And in in the long run, you have to make high level approximate heuristic decisions. You have to pick up on emotional signals, you have to look at high level objectives and, and you know, quote unquote kind of do random sampling and trying different things to converge uh on the best solution.
And so a core reason why those who penny pinch fail to see long term success is they remain frozen in their intoxicating yet grossly incorrect narratives about how to best plan for the future. They don't put themselves in opportunities way, which means, you know, rigorously that they do not attempt enough paths, they don't sample the possibility of space to converge on a solution, right?
Instead they just, you know, they, they choose sounding smart and being comfortable uh which rarely if ever pays off in the long run. OK. So there's another property of real world situations that, that tells us not only that things don't accumulate as sums, right, which I talked about previously, you don't just take bits of information, add them and then get an output. It's not how it works, but that whatever has been accumulated can be lost in an instant. OK?
And this is, this is super relevant to the literal example of penny pinching. But again, it, it applies to all forms. So, you know, the most famous recent example might be, you know, again, going back to the COVID stuff where businesses, particularly small ones, they lost much of what they had overnight. And many larger businesses only survived because of things like bailouts.
But you know, or, or you might use Bitcoin as an example where you've got the extreme volatility in book in Bitcoin, we'll have people excited for a number of months and then, you know, the numbers climb, they get excited and you know, you're making all this money and then all of a sudden the gains get completely wiped out. Everything that had been gained up to that point, you know, gets wiped out in one day right now.
Again, depending on where you are with your investments that may or may not affect you. But the point is is that this pattern of building, building, building, building and then in one instant boom things get wiped out is inevitable. It happens, it will happen. It's not if it's when. Ok. Now, what about na, we'll talk a little bit more about this. But what about nature? Do, do we see natural systems lose everything in a moment? Well, in most systems, we actually don't.
Most natural systems and the reason should be fairly obvious. Nature doesn't penny pinch. Right now, there are catastrophes that happen, but a lot of times what we call a catastrophe is actually just related to the human impression of the event as opposed to nature, you know, quote unquote thinking is a catastrophe, right? Nature doesn't penny pinch. Ok. So we don't really see that. In fact, we see the opposite phenomenon, we see redundancy everywhere.
So I'll talk about why that would be considered the opposite. Uh Let, let's take, for example, the human heart, if you look at an intricate image of coronary circulation, you're gonna see something that looks like an awful lot of redundancy, right? It looks like the exact opposite of efficiency. What appears to be, you know, a massive amount of waste?
Ok. Because you see the same pattern repeating itself again and again, channels of circulation going every which way instead of a direct path towards its destination, which is what you would think if you were an engineer and, and you know, you wanted to, you know, transport heart from uh blood from one place to another, you might say Ok.
Well, you know, I got a tube coming in here and then I got a tube coming out there and this is the, you know, the the path of least resistance and this is the shortest distance it has to travel whatever. So you would, you would engineer it very efficiently, right? So what's with the mess in, in, in the human heart? Why is that so crazy, intricate and redundant and, and seemingly wasteful looks messy actually. But of course, this is on purpose after all, this is nature, right?
Redundancy is how nature operates on simpler rules. If you try to account for every contingency, you end up with over engineered solutions that break. Unlike many of today's outdated business models, successful systems are redundant, they're inefficient, they're approximate, they're not trying to tally everything up. They take advantage of what looks like waste, they take advantage of redundancy because that fallback allows them to, to, to have events that would otherwise be catastrophic.
It allows their systems to not be fragile. OK. Penny pinching is the opposite of redundancy. It tries to only do what is absolutely necessary assuming that that kind of behavior will map to better outcomes in the future. Ok. So just as businesses who keep tight efficiencies on their processes exist as extremely fragile entities who can go bust at any moment. So too do penny pinchers expose themselves to extreme fragility?
Ok. So penny pinching it, it doesn't have any buffer capital, as you might say, right? There's no kind of leftover stuff just in case it's like a penny painter is like a business who is just keeping everything very, very tight, very, very efficient, very, very added up. And so it's only a matter of time that everything safe to date is wiped out in a single event. Ok. And of course, this is what we see all the time. We should all be at least somewhat be able to relate to this, right?
We we we try to put in place plans, recipes, you know, efficiencies, processes that tally up the available information and turn it into a strategy going forward. But what inevitably happens? Some type of catastrophic failure, catastrophic failure, right? A health crisis, a job loss, a friend in need, a broken vehicle part, whatever it is, something inevitably pops up in that rare yet impactful moment that wipes out everything that was saved up to that point.
Ok. So it, it's important to understand what this means. It's not just that all the accumulated wealth by whatever definition of wealth we are using, right? Doesn't have to be money, but it's not just that all that wealth is lost. It means that information, whatever nitpicking planning, penny pinching behavior preceded the loss was borderline pointless, right?
None of that made secure the revenue, the business, the friendship, the family, the opportunity, the so-called efficient use of information and resources is something that only exists at the shortest temporal scales, right, the the shortest time frame and, and, and as soon as you move beyond that or at some point when you move beyond that over the long run, it's inevitable that that is going to get lost.
Now again, this doesn't mean that everything you save is definitely going to get lost all the time. I mean, it could, you know, you, you could save for a little bit and then maybe you, you were able to take advantage of that accumulated peace. I mean, we all have instances of that in life as well.
But by and large, the penny pinching behavior is gonna hurt you more than it's going to benefit you because you cannot predict when those events are going to happen when you're gonna need it or when you might lose it, right? That again, going back to the opacity of the uh of complex situations. Ok? So when you don't have a true handle on it, the, the, the moments when your penny pinching behavior paid off was luck.
Ok. Statistically speaking, it was luck because there was no way to know when the event was going to arise. Ok? And, and now again, there might be situations where, well, no, I was aiming to save for the two years because two years later I wanted to go purchase something. Yeah. Ok. Again, sometimes that can happen for sure. But by and large, I argue that that type of behavior is going to hurt you more often than not because those goals change. Right.
You might, yeah, in two years you want to buy two years is a long time. Lots of things, lots of different things can happen. How often do our goals? New Year's resolutions, whatever change. Right. All the time. Ok. So it's not that penny pinching behavior will never pay off. Right. Of course, it might. But, but in the long run, it's going to hurt you more than it helps you. And I think, you know, you can think of other examples of this.
So things in life where, you know, the odd time you might have done something that, that, that, you know, maybe see smart or not smart and end up paying off. But then you tried it again and again and it just didn't work, right? You got to think about what in the broader context of things actually pays off in the long run because those types of behaviors are what are going to lead to more contentment, to more happiness, to, to quote unquote richness, right? And we see this in people.
So, so redundancy isn't just about having, you know, backups. OK? From an informational standpoint, it's about the same pattern we discussed in the last section. It's that nature builds for contingency, not just OK because I, you know, if something goes wrong, I have a backup, but the contingency is what assures multiple attempts can be made to solve a problem.
OK. So we're, we're, we're not just thinking, oh, I've got all this buffer behind me so that if something goes wrong, I got more, think of it more as a problem solving exercise, right? Redundancy gives you more possibilities to try more things. If you go back to that circulatory kind of diagram I was talking about with the heart, you, you're not trying to say what's the best, you know, uh direction or path for the blood to flow. Who cares?
You don't know because all the kinds of different things can happen, right? What you want to do if you were to design a heart is say let's just have lots of options to take different paths. OK? Because there could be different situations where the same path might not be the best path, right? It's going to depend on the situation, it's going to depend on complexity. So there are far more opportunities to arrive at the right solution when faced with a challenge from our environment.
And we have many possible paths to attempt the intricacies of the human heart are just another example of nature of a redundant problem solving machine. OK? And that's, that's really the point. So what I want to talk about now is how the behavior of of non penny pinching actually precedes the getting rich. OK? Because where people get it wrong is they assume that only the poor quote unquote by any definition only the poor penny pinch because they have to. Right. Which, which kind of makes sense.
It's like, well, you don't have a lot of money. So I have to penny pinch. Right. That's why, that's why people that don't, aren't being successful in life by any definition of success or penny pinching. Because they have to, I argue that penny pinching behavior actually precedes the successful outcome of people.
Ok. In other words, when you see someone successful in life, they, they, they seem to care less about saving money, they care less about finding efficiencies or weighing the pros and cons. It's not because the success precludes the need to worry about these things, right? Rather it's because they were like this before. The success, people who take the broader context operate at the surface, embrace trial and error and and are steeped in redundancy and have they tend to have more success in life.
Ok. These individuals don't pretend to know how things map to the future, right? They understand intuitively that the amount and type of information needed to make analytical decisions is not available in complex situations. So next time you notice someone moving through life successfully by any definition of success, note, their behavior, are they penny pinching at every turn? Are they trying to squeeze out every possible advantage?
Tally up every little piece of information or running cost benefit analysis or are they operating at a higher level? Using heuristics and general patterns to make decisions. Are they able to, to move forward using scant data about a situation? Do they seem to create more than one might think possible on a tight deadline? Do they seem to quote unquote, waste time and resources on things that don't look productive? Do they appear less stressed when things go south?
Do they seem to appreciate something bigger than the present moment? My guess is you will notice if you haven't already that it's the latter set of behaviors. It's not the penny pinching, tallying up. I'm going to try to control everything. Those people are often stressed. Right. It's not life that gets in your way. It's your plans that get in your way. Right. Those people are fragile, right? I don't mean like emotionally fragile.
I just mean that they, they, they operate through life in a, as a fragile entity that's gonna break. Ok. They don't have all those different paths of which they attempt. You have to be approximate. You have to be high level. You will notice this with people who are successful by any definition of success. It's not to be money, but it could just be that you notice they are happy a lot, they seem to be content or they have a really good family structure and that's working really well.
They met someone and it's a solid relationship for a long time. This could be any definition of, of, of quote unquote rich. Ok. But you will notice that behavior because all of those things I just said are complex situations and you have to navigate through them and you will not navigate through them successfully if you are penny pinching. Ok. So the human search for narrative, you know, it, it makes it too easy to assume that some people are just smarter or more capable, right?
We do this all the time, but in reality, they have behaviors that work better under complexity. It's not some inherent intelligence or privileged place in life, right? Those excuses make it too easy to not understand what's going on. An honest. Look at what's happening, looks at how complex problems get solved. OK? It takes into account how information does and does not map to future scenarios.
What becomes obvious when doing so is is how some people are embracing their natural evolutionary ability to solve problems and operate with very little available information. This is how our ancestors survived for millions of years. And so this should make sense, right? This is the natural way to do things. So, so what do we do about it? I mean, how do, how do we get away from penny pinching behavior because we all do this to some extent, some definitely more than other than others.
I would argue that this comes down to accepting that we do not have access to anywhere near the information we tend to think we do, right? It makes sense that we would think we do because we live in an information economy, right? We have access to information uh all over the place on the internet, right? Anything and everything. But having access to large amounts of information is not the same as being able to extract knowledge or even better wisdom from it.
And that's because a model of how something actually works is a synthesis of the various pieces of information without an ability to blend the information into an emergent understanding. We're not getting what we think we are. OK. That's the difference between just kind of access to raw data and actual wisdom that you can use in life.
So, so this is why technology is, you know, as an example, like like machine learning, if you've heard of machine learning, they work the way they do machine learning takes a very different approach to computing, right? You know, the really kind of brief history of it is that computer science was chugging along as it did, which was very, you know, we write rules into pro into computers and and the input, you know, logically becomes the output.
Well, that can only solve a certain class of problems, a certain class of problems that we would call simple. They don't work to solve truly complex problems like facial recognition or voice, you know, voice recognition or all the kinds of things that you, you know, you can go online and see what machine learning does machine learning are not pieces of software that merely ingest data and run through rules based programming in order to produce an output.
In fact, this is exactly what machine learning is not. OK. Machine learning works because it creates approximate models to produce its output. It pays attention only to the high level signals and feedback and attempts to reproduce that output or find high level, you know similarities between things in the data groups and categories, not by rules but by kind of approximate notions of distance and similarity. So machine learning is the very antithesis of rules based analytical analysis.
Now, why the heck am I talking about machine learning? Well, the the you know, this is not about machine learning. But the reason I use ML as an example is because it's a technology that came about to solve problems that traditional rules based software could not genuinely complex problems by the true definition of complexity cannot be solved using logical analytical rules based thinking or computing.
OK. So this episode is isn't about ML, but it's about this idea that any information processing entity capable of making complex problems tractable has the non penny pinching behavior, right? ML only achieves this for the most, you know, narrow of, of ways but genuine intelligence like the human mind does this exceedingly well. OK. It's how we have adapted to solve real world problems. And so there's a similarity between, you know, machine learning and how human minds work.
I'm not trying to say that similarity is super tight. I'm just saying that look in it, whether it's engineering or whether it's human reasoning, any time you're faced with a complex problem, there is a way to do that and it is high level, it is surface level, it is not analytical, it is not logical, it is not rules based, it does not have some well-defined causal chain mapping inputs to outputs. Never, never, never, never has that ever happened in the history of humanity ever.
OK. This is not an opinion, complex problems do not get solved like that period. You will never find a single example of it and and from the past or into the future. OK. We know this, we got 7 million years of hominid evolution behind us that shows us this is the case complex problems don't get solved using rules. They never have, they never will. OK? So, so going forward, you know, how do you, how do you not penny pinch? Why?
You know we we understand now hopefully you understand now why to get away from penny pinching behavior? How do we take that forward? I would say that that what we should do is learn to pay attention only to the highest level signals, to aim and to move the highest levels of abstraction from our environment that suggest a course of action.
OK. This is of course the role emotions play in problem solving our education system has hardwired us to think of problem solving in the mechanistic logical fashion that only works for the simplistic OK. Kind of kind of laboratory setting problems where you want to extract and isolate in order to define something to define something. But in the real world components don't dictate behavior.
Interaction does because again, in the real world components, those individual pieces don't dictate behavior interaction between them does interaction that creates this opacity, this this wall that you can't get past. You can't see how inputs become outputs. We simply don't have the ability to see how inputs are causally connected to outputs period. OK. So forget penny pinching, logical telling of information.
Stop weighing what you think of the pros and cons, stop cutting out coupons and pining over where to eat and running your potential life partner through a checklist, stressing over what clothes to bring on a camping trip or spending more than 10 minutes, reading hotel reviews or paying super close attention to your investments that are that are that are at the whim of the market, right? The vagaries of the market, this kind of behavior won't produce good outcomes in the long run.
You need to sample a vast number of possibilities. You need to place yourself in opportunities way you need to take on the willingness to be redundant, messy, inefficient, approximate ill defined emotional a very non analytical approach. The reason is not to shun logic or issue analytical thinking, these have their place.
OK. The reason is to leverage what nature has given you, which is a mental and physical arsenal, to deal with highly complex situations, to make tractable the kind of high dimensional problems that arise in our personal and professional lives. Instead of trying to sound smart, we should be smart. That's all I had today. Thanks for listening. If you liked what you heard, please consider giving me a five star rating and, and maybe even a short review. It would really help me a lot again.
I'm Sean mcclure. This is non-trivial. Thanks so much until next time.